A social network service is an online service, platform or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people (e.g., those who share interests and/or activities). A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as by e-mail and instant messaging. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.
In a multi-tenant social networking environment, where a tenant is an organization, a user of an organization may want to share content with other organizations. For example, when a user desires to share content with other organizations, the user may have to explicitly enter the name of each individual of the organization to receive the shared content. However, by manually entering the name of each individual to receive the shared content, errors can result, such as mistyping a name or an e-mail, thereby resulting in an improper person receiving the shared content.
An alternative approach to sharing content with other organizations involves using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) groups. However, these LDAP groups are fixed lists of users, possibly from an organization, and do not allow the user to specifically control which users from the fixed list of users can receive the shared content. Furthermore, these LDAP groups do not indicate the organizations of the listed users. Hence, the user does not know the organization of a user listed in the LDAP group.
Hence, a user cannot currently control which users from an organization are to be part of a community space in an easy and error-free manner.